More is unraveling than most people realize.

More is possible than most people imagine.

This site maps both.

OVERSHOOT · RECOVERY · REGENERATION

Scientists have been clear for decades: we are in ecological overshoot. Most of us can feel it. What's less clear is what to do — not at the abstract level of global policy, but here, in our bodies, our communities, our watersheds.

What's different about this site is how we see what comes next. We draw from history, psychotherapy, somatic and trauma work, attachment work, 12 step recovery, ecological science, healthy economics, and systems thinking. These aren't separate. Our experience is large numbers of people can heal from the root causes of overshoot — and recover alongside the ecosystems and bioregions they inhabit. This is not reassurance. The numbers are well beyond what Earth can sustain, and there are challenging times ahead. We're offering something more specific than hope: a clear-eyed and practical account of how we got here, and a recovery path that some people are already walking.

Why this site exists

I wrote this site over many years. I had a psychotherapy practice in the U.S., then spent years apprenticing full time with a Shipibo Shaman in the Amazon — doing plant medicine dietas, living with him and his family. Those processes moved me through a lot of denial about what's happening to the Earth. In dieta the pain could be crushing as I experienced the destruction of the Earth, again and again, and that I was participating in life-deadening ways of living — plastics, fossil fuels, food and clothes made by people treated as indentured servants. I witnessed clear-cutting of old growth forests I love dearly, forests that had brought me back to life. The rate of extinctions in places I lived, and globally, keeps rising. And I was shown my own patterns of extraction reflected back at me.

I have over three decades of meditation, yoga, and mind-body practices, along with extensive training in trauma and addictions work. Even with all of that, it was all I could do to not dissociate — to stay in my body while taking all of this in.

I also lived over a decade in Latin America, watching corruption, poverty, drugs, crime, and violence increase. Part of getting through those years was doing extensive research, and a lot of innerwork to stay connected to my feelings and stay in my body, and stay connected to life-affirming ways of living. This site offers what I've distilled — the research, and the tools — for others to use.

How to use this site

There are several ways in — and the Inner Work tools support all of them.

The Inner Work section can be used with everything on this site. Whether you're doing a Global Solutions Game or working the 12 steps (both explained below), reading the research alone, or exploring with friends — this material is more than most of us can take in all at once. That's not a personal failing; it's the honest size of what's happening. Most of us have nowhere to work with it — even many therapists don't want to talk about it. The Inner Work section offers distilled tools for grounding and working with emotions, including trauma processing and release. These tools are also valuable for eco-grief, and for witnessing destruction to ecosystems and places we love. The site is meant to be used interactively: read a section, do a grounding exercise, read more, do some inner parts work, etc. This is how we metabolize what we're learning rather than getting overwhelmed — or going numb. The Inner Work section also covers attachment, the addictive process running through society, letting go of shame, and ways to move forward. This work is foundational — both for navigating what's ahead and for real transformation.

Many of us feel we already know. I know, I know — it's bad. But knowing about something intellectually and being prepared for it are different things. Some questions worth sitting with: Do I have a basic understanding of what's happening scientifically? Am I connected to how I actually feel about it, or am I still holding it at a distance? If I understand it and feel it — what's my plan? Do I know where my food comes from now, and where it might come from as supply chains tighten? What might happen to my local social structure?

Regenerative Recovery™ (RR™) is a 12-step program adapted for this transition. It draws on the most proven behavior-change model in history — the tools most effective for clearing denial and changing entrenched patterns. Group support, visioning meetings, sponsorship, simple action steps. The magical solutions on offer — electric cars, new energy, the market will sort it out — leave the deeper pattern untouched. Those of us making the shifts this site describes are largely doing it without a well-worn path to follow. That's why ongoing support and structured tools matter: the changes are real, the variables are many, and we haven't seen many others do it yet. RR is the core recovery path the site offers, for those ready to begin.

We can also run a Global Solutions Game™ (GSG™) — a structured conversation with people who are willing to look as honestly as possible at what's happening. This isn't a conversation a lot of society is having. Sitting with people who don't want to talk about it, even if they're family or close friends, tends not to work. Better to gather people who are open, even if the group is smaller. These topics can bring up a lot, and many people have nowhere to talk about it. The GSG is a place for that.

The current global situation is a predicament rather than a problem. Problems have solutions; predicaments are ongoing, and we navigate them. There's no completion here, no fix that returns things to normal. What the Global Solutions Game offers is shared, grounded understanding — not from beliefs or news cycles, but from decades of systems science. The Limits to Growth study, run on early computer models in the 1970s, projected where the current trajectory would lead: ecological degradation, water scarcity, extreme weather, crop failures, and rising conflict over shrinking resources. That trajectory is now visible everywhere. Top scientists differ on specific timelines and outcomes, not on the direction. Running scenarios moves the information from our heads into the room, into our bodies. It becomes real.

We see much of the predicament as an addictive process (more on that below), and trying to change it while swimming in it can feel exhausting — not unlike trying to live a grounded life inside a family or community with a lot of dysfunction. So instead we start with fresh eyes, drawing from Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication. Rosenberg said: "Perhaps the most important human need is the need to contribute to life, to enrich life, to make life more wonderful for everyone." He came back to this repeatedly — that this is the real game, and once you feel it, nothing else is the same. If we're immersed in making ends meet with food and rent, this can sound idealistic. But it's not. It's what the tools on this site are for.

Before a GSG meets, participants read the sections of the site that draw them. Ideally the key sections get covered across the group, so the conversation has the full picture — but people and groups already familiar with a topic don't need to revisit it. It's extremely useful to use the inner work tools during the GSG itself — to help ground, track what's happening, and process emotions.

The sections on energy, economy, ecology, extinctions, debt, inequality, and the historical patterns underneath map what's actually happening. They draw on decades of the strongest work in these fields, along with the tools that help people change. For those who read them, they can be life-changing. This site exists because what I learned showed me I needed to make deep structural shifts in how I lived my life.

The Breakdown

Humanity has been in ecological overshoot since 1970 — using the planet's resources faster than it can renew them. By August 1st, 2024, we'd used what the Earth can regenerate in a full year; everything after was drawn from stored reserves.

Cheap oil is ending. Meanwhile, the minerals needed for a like-for-like renewable transition — copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare earths — don't exist in the quantities required. Independent analysts have shown that even one generation of alternative energy infrastructure at current industrial scale would exceed what can be mined. The International Energy Agency, more conservative, still projects supply gaps of up to 30% for copper and 40% for lithium by 2035. Ore grades are declining, new discoveries are slowing, and mining is already tearing through ecosystems from Ecuador to the Congo. Critical metals prices have risen sharply in recent years and continue to climb.

The sixth mass extinction is underway. Species are disappearing at rates not seen since the dinosaurs — insects, birds, amphibians, mammals, plants. Entire branches of the tree of life are thinning.

Warm-water coral reefs are in serious trouble. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who has studied reefs for over 30 years, wrote a landmark paper in 1999 predicting the loss of the world's coral reefs by 2050. Twenty-five years later, he says the prediction is on track. The IPCC has projected that at 1.5°C of warming — a level we are approaching now — 70 to 90% of coral reefs will disappear. At 2°C, that number rises to 99%. Bleaching events that used to occur every five to seven years now come back-to-back, with no time for reefs to recover. As Hoegh-Guldberg's colleague Sophie Dove told him: it's not about bleaching, it's about death. The reef systems that supported a quarter of all marine life are losing their ecological function. Coral organisms will persist in refuges, but the reef worlds humans have known are going.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the ocean current system that stabilizes global climate — is weakening, with a 59% chance of tipping by 2050 (Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute). Polar ice systems are destabilizing.

These aren't isolated stresses. They're the beginning of a fundamental reorganization of the conditions human civilization was built on. The stable Holocene climate that allowed agriculture and complex societies to emerge is unwinding.

On a personal note: It took me hours to write this section. I researched the coral dying over and over. At that point I felt my breathing shallow and a numbness, and tears. I felt incredible sadness start to come up. I was barely conscious enough to see it was overwhelming and I pushed it back down. I moved to another project. I started to get extremely angry about something else. I remembered I’d pushed the feelings about coral down. I did some grounding, breath work, and talked with a friend. I came back and finished the coral piece and let myself cry. It's almost more pain than I can bear.

This is why the tools on this site exist. For those who see it and want a way to stay in their bodies, in community, and honest about what's happening, the Inner Work and Regenerative Recovery paths are here.

Underneath all of this are patterns within patterns. The one we see at the core — and the one people have agency over —

Extraction Addiction

The taking of more than is given back — from land, from labor, from time, from each other — can show up at every scale: a person, a household, a company, a civilization. A certain amount exists in any society. What turns it into an addiction is when the behavior continues against mounting evidence of harm, and the story told about it stops matching what's actually happening.

Extraction addiction is real.

Recovery is real.

"An addictive process is where the mind insists a behavior is helpful or necessary — while the behavior causes sickness, or even death."

The dominant economic story tells us: consume more, grow more, the market will solve it. Enough of us live inside that story that the pattern continues — and the story has the exact structure of addiction. The short-term relief is real, the long-term harm is mounting, and the gap between what we tell ourselves and what's actually happening keeps widening.

Choices that drive deforestation, mass extinction, and inequality fit this definition precisely. We might tell ourselves they're necessary. Meanwhile they're producing collective sickness at planetary scale.

The 12-step tradition has something direct to say about this: we don't recover by waiting for the world to become less addictive. We recover by changing our own relationship to the pattern — one decision at a time, with support, accountability, and honesty. Programs like Debtors Anonymous, Underearners Anonymous, and Workaholics Anonymous offer concrete tools for exactly this kind of change. Regenerative Recovery combines tools from those programs.

Admittedly the extraction pattern is embedded — in the food, the clothes, the housing, the transport, the money itself. Recovery means seeing that clearly and taking the next honest step from wherever we actually stand.

The Regenerative Recovery path draws on what actually works: the hard science of how ecosystems and economies collapse, the evolutionary biology of how humans cooperate, the regenerative agriculture practices that rebuild soil and local food systems, the trauma tools that help us metabolize grief and fear rather than freeze in it, the body practices that regulate an overwhelmed nervous system, the group structures that turn isolation into shared action, and the ancient-but-proven recovery wisdom of people who have walked out of compulsive patterns and rebuilt their lives.

The Path Forward

Recovery begins in place.

For most of human history, people lived in intimate reciprocity with specific places — watersheds, seasons, soil types, local communities. That intimacy turns out to be both the antidote to domination and the foundation of genuine resilience.

Bioregional regeneration is organizing life around watersheds, foodsheds, and local economies — around ecological reality rather than political borders. Regenerative agriculture rebuilds the soil and the relationships that sustain it. Direct democracy at human scale — the kind practiced in citizens assemblies and neighborhood committees — makes genuine cooperation possible again.

David Sloan Wilson's research shows altruistic groups outcompete selfish ones over time. Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize work identified the eight design principles that make a commons and cooperative governance work at any scale. These aren't utopian ideas — they're patterns that have been studied for decades and work when people do them.

"The sacrifices we have to make to achieve sustainability are far less than you believe. We're sacrificing our wellbeing on the altar of endless growth and consumption."

— Josh Farley, Ecological Economist

The path forward doesn't require us waiting for someone else or a government to change things first. It begins with what is available right now, in the place where we actually live.

What's Actually Happening — and the Ways Through

These sections (accessed via the tabs at the top of the website) draw on psychotherapy, somatic and trauma work, attachment work, 12 step recovery, ecological science, healthy economics, and systems thinking.

Regenerative Recovery (RR)™: A 12-step fellowship for recovery from Extraction Addiction — the pattern of taking more than we give back, from land, labor, and each other, while telling ourselves it's necessary. Includes the RR Preamble, the adapted 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, meeting formats, sponsorship, visioning and action meetings, tools, and how to start a meeting. For those ready to work the program with others.

The Inner Work. Not supplemental to the environmental crisis — central to it. Practices for eco-grief, ecodeath syndrome, and the particular disorientation of staying clear in societies that are shutting down or checking out. Draws on Bowlby, Porges, Ogden, Rothschild, van der Kolk, Brené Brown, and the twelve-step tradition. Includes attachment work, parts dialogue, body scans, tapping, vocalization, and grounding tools for staying in the body — for not going numb, not dissociating, not disappearing into denial when what's happening is this big. For some of us, these have been the difference between functioning and not.

12 Step Model: Toward Personal and Bioregional Recovery: The case for why 12-step recovery is the most proven behavior-change model in history, and why it applies directly to the extraction pattern. Covers Debtors Anonymous, Underearners Anonymous, and Workaholics Anonymous — the programs that address the personal expression of the extraction economy. The psychology of why the method works: nervous system co-regulation, testimony that dissolves shame, small steps that build agency, sponsorship as transmitted experience.

Built to Cooperate: How Cooperation Wins When We Design for It. Evolutionary biology shows we are not inherently selfish — we are designed to cooperate in the right conditions. Multilevel selection, the super-chicken problem, Elinor Ostrom's eight design principles. The science of building communities that actually work.

Bioregional Regeneration: Organizing from the Watershed. What it looks like to root life in a specific place — a watershed, a foodshed, a local community. The practical and psychological shift from alienated consumer to participant in a living system. Where the path forward becomes concrete and local.

Collapse Clarity: Joseph Tainter on Complexity and Decline. Why civilizations don't collapse from the outside — they collapse from the weight of their own complexity. Declining energy returns, the innovation trap, the math of diminishing returns. How Extraction Addiction drives runaway complexity — and where recovery begins.

Overview of Overshoot — The Situation and Ways to Live in Harmony with the Earth. The clearest account of where we are: ocean systems failing, glaciers crossing tipping points, minerals running short, energy declining. Not to induce despair — but because seeing clearly is where recovery begins. Includes a path toward bioregional adaptation.

Hitting Bottom: The Emotional Reality — and the Recovery Tools That Work. Many of us sensing something is wrong oscillate between pushing harder and going numb. This section names what's happening with neurobiology — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — and offers concrete tools for moving through it, at both individual and community scale.

Biophysical Limits: Energy, Metals, and the End of Business as Usual. The clearest synthesis of what physics and geology are actually saying: oil EROI in decline, minerals insufficient for a like-for-like renewable transition, no true energy substitution in history — ever. Seven thinkers from different disciplines converging on the same conclusion. Not a counsel of despair — a map of what is actually available, and how to design from there.

Inequality Explained: How Wealth Gets Transferred from the Many to the Few. The petrodollar, unequal exchange, debt-based money, and ecological economics — explained plainly. Why it's unjust, how we might participate — in extracting, or in being extracted from — and what healthier societies would look like.

One Last Thing

We can remind ourselves, we don't know how this will all end.

There's an old Taoist story about a farmer whose horse ran away. His neighbors came by and said, "What terrible luck." The farmer said, "Maybe."

The next day the horse came back, bringing seven wild horses with it. The neighbors came by and said, "What wonderful luck." The farmer said, "Maybe."

The day after that, the farmer's son was trying to ride one of the wild horses, got thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors came by and said, "What terrible luck." The farmer said, "Maybe."

The next day military officers came through the village conscripting young men for a war. They saw the son's broken leg and passed him by. The neighbors came by and said, "What wonderful luck." The farmer said, "Maybe."

The farmer isn't optimistic or pessimistic. He's present. He does the next thing in front of him without deciding what it all means. We don't know how the larger story ends. We do know how recovery works — it's helped millions of people, and there's a clearly outlined path for those who wish.

Psychothearapy · Evolutionary biology · Ecological economics · Complexity science · Bioregional regeneration · Regenerative agriculture · 12-step recovery · EMDR & somatic therapies · Sociocracy · Indigenous land relationships

Overshoot & Recovery · Written by Jeff Gilbert with editing by AI

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